At the Council for Foreign Relations Web site, David Fidler says that Edward Snowden isn’t radical enough. He identifies three problems with the proposal that Snowden, David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras have made for a treaty to stop indiscriminate surveillance and protect whistle blowers.

"Other experts pointed out that we don’t know for sure what happens to these exchanges when they are collected. Jonathan Mayer, a cybersecurity fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, said many important features of Upstream collection "haven’t leaked and remain classified," such as whether it involves bulk collection, massive-but-targeted collection or only individually targeted collection, he said.

"“We never had any real information about how these programs were used until now,” ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson said. “Reform efforts were stymied by a lack of information. The Snowden leaks really dislodged those efforts.”"

Edward Snowden has given us an unprecedented window into the NSA's surveillance activities. Drawing from both the Snowden documents and revelations from previous whistleblowers, this talk describes the sorts of surveillance the NSA conducts and how it conducts it. The emphasis will be on the technical capabilities of the NSA, and not the politics or legality of their actions. I will then discuss what sorts of countermeasures are likely to frustrate any nation-state adversary with these sorts of capabilities. These will be techniques to raise the cost of wholesale surveillance in favor of targeted surveillance: ubiquitous encryption, target dispersal, anonymity tools, and so on.

Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board Chairman, David Medine, will address how to strike the right balance between national security and privacy and civil liberties in federal counterterrorism programs.

"WELNA: It could indeed. Hackers, by definition, are trying to break into other people's computer accounts and steal their information, so monitoring their activity means watching them poach on other people's Internet usage and private data. I talked with Jonathan Mayer, a computer security fellow at Stanford who's reviewed these latest Snowden documents. He says because of the way the surveillance law is written, the NSA can actually hang on to that hacked information.